Sketches
by Speechwriter
Summary: A collection of oneshots and character sketches. Varied topics, from Dean Thomas' love of football to Hermione's childhood if she'd had an older brother. Written from prompts.
1. Hermione

**Hello! These are brief oneshots on scattered topics, crossposted from my blog so I can have them all in one place. I'll post one a week until I run out.**

**Without further ado, here's the first prompt fill:**

_**Hermione + siblings and their reactions to magic (I don't remember if she had siblings I think she was an only but still write a story about it pleeeaase)**_

* * *

Hermione Granger's older brother was a bully, and a saint. If he had been one or the other, dealing with him would have been easy. It was the combination of the two that made life complicated.

He didn't bully Hermione, of course. No — Titus adored his little sister with the sort of enthusiasm that suggested deep envy. "She's smarter than me already," he told everybody in year 5, "and she's only seven."

It was true. Hermione _was _smarter than him already. Titus, however, had his own advantages: he had been blessed with gold-kissed skin and the sort of youthful smile that wouldn't have looked out of place in an advertisement for children's dental care. He was polite, hardworking, and generous, with good marks and a knack for football. In short, he was a saint.

But he was also a nightmare.

Those in year 5 would have told you that Titus Granger should be a judge, or perhaps an executioner, when he grew up. The boy did not bully people for the fun of it. The boy bullied those he perceived to have done something unforgivable.

One day, Eric Janeway yanked one of Sarah Cresswater's braids. The next day, Eric Janeway came to school with a broken finger.

Anabel Rosing told the whole school about a crush that another girl had. In response, Titus went through the exhausting and irritating process of determining Anabel's own crush; he then hung a sign on her back that read, _I Love Nick Harrington. _She wore it all day before realizing it was there, and by then, it was far too late.

Once, during break, Jill Hunting kicked Rolland Howard in the shins during a game of football. Jill took the football, and instead of helping Rolland up or even stopping to ask if he was all right, she dribbled the ball to the opposing net and scored. Nobody really knew what Titus did to Jill after that, but she abstained from all future scrimmages.

Titus was the avenging angel of the schoolyard, a bizarre mixture between lawmaker and revenge artist. Everybody loathed him, and was terrified of him, and Hermione Granger realized this gradually, rather than all at once.

The older students gave her strange looks, sometimes. Whenever she saw her brother during break, she noted that people steered clear of him. In fact, people steered clear of her altogether. She wondered why she was having so much difficulty making friends — were they really _that _put-off by her personality? — but eventually, the truth trickled down to her in Year 3.

Hermione felt betrayed. Never one to avoid a topic she cared about, she asked Titus the next day, as they walked home, "Titus, why do you bully people?"

He laughed. "Bully? Who said I _bullied _people?"

"Sara Antwerp. And Gray Heatherton. And —"

"All right, all right." He scowled. "I don't bully anybody. I do what's fair."_  
_

"That's subjective."

"You and your big words."

"What I mean is, how do you know it's fair?"

Titus shrugged. "I just do. Look, Sis, do you know who Newton is?"

"No."

"We just learned about him. He's a scientist. He says, for everything that happens, there has to be an equal but opposite reaction."

Hermione folded her arms. "Are you the opposite reaction, then?"

"I think so," Titus said. "Besides, _you_ always do what's right. Why does it bother you, bad people getting what they deserve?"

Hermione searched for an answer, but couldn't come up with one. That frustrated her.

Her response was to read philosophical books on morality that were thicker than her wrists. Even she, conqueror of thick books, struggled with some of these. _Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind, _said Haidt. _It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong,_ said Nietzsche._  
_

But when she finished reading her books on morality, the world simply seemed more complicated than before, and people were still afraid of her brother, and he was still a bully — and other things had started to happen besides, things that drew her attention far more fully than nebulous questions of morality.

Halfway through Year 3, she received poor marks on an assignment. In the wake of her horror and anger, all the chalk in the classroom plummeted to the floor at once, splintering like bones.

At the start of Year 4, she tripped off a playground platform. Rather than hitting the packed dirt, she found herself landing in a thick pile of grass that had definitely not been there before. As soon as she got up and brushed herself off, it was gone.

Hermione wasn't one to let this go unquestioned. She researched supernatural abilities in real life, strange occurrences, _magic_. She found nothing, which frustrated her almost to tears. There had to be some sort of explanation, but books — for the first time — failed her.

Either way, she knew she was different.

When she was in Year 5, Eric Janeway nicknamed her. _Eager Beaver, _he called her, not for her persistence, but for the teeth that were getting more and more protuberant as time went on. Hermione had always been shunned — ignored for who her brother was, and mocked for what her interests were — but this nickname escalated things to the point of being practically unbearable.

She ignored it with mulish determination. She reassured herself with the knowledge that she was doing Janeway a favor by not telling her brother. This made her the bigger person, right?

She doubled down on reading as people walked by her, snickering about _beaver teeth. _She held back hot tears in the bathroom as people tugged her frizzy hair and dashed away.

Deep down, she wondered what good it was being the bigger person, if being the bigger person just meant that you felt stamped beneath a crowd of smaller people's feet.

Then, one day, Titus found out what they were calling his little sister.

Hermione caught him cornering Eric Janeway behind the school building during break. "Stop!" she said. "Titus, stop!"

Titus looked at her with disbelief. "He's _bullying_ you, Hermione."

"I know that," she said. "Don't you think I know that?"

"Then why —"

"It — I just — let people handle it for themselves, why don't you!" she burst out.

Titus cocked his head and was quiet for a long moment. "Why don't I?" he said, finally. "Because people do this all the time, Hermione. They'll wait for things to get better, like you. They'll get hurt, like you. They'll let themselves be walked over, like you have, in the name of being _better people _than the people who are hurting them." His eyes hardened. "And that's not _better_ enough for me."

Then he punched Eric Janeway in the eye.

Janeway crumpled against the wall and began to cry. Titus rubbed his knuckles and walked over to Hermione.

"Well?" Titus said.

Looking at her brother, Hermione was startled by the conviction on his face.

"Do you understand?" he said. "Do you at least understand _why _I do this?"

"I don't know," Hermione said, her voice tiny, her thoughts churning.

The next day, at break, Hermione was sitting on a bench, reading. She sat beside Cathy Richards, a doughy, glasses-wearing girl who was snacking on a muffin.

Anabel Rosing, passing them, shot Cathy a derisive look. "Fatty Cathy," she hissed, before going back to her phone._  
_

Something hot lit in Hermione's chest. She looked up slowly. Her fists tightened on the edges of her book, and her teeth clenched.

And Anabel Rosing's phone shattered in her hands.

She screamed and dropped the mess of glass and metal. She stumbled back, her eyes brimming almost instantly with tears.

Hermione glanced around the schoolyard. People were turning toward the commotion.

And not far away, her brother stood against a tree, shock slathered onto his expression. He had seen the entire thing.

As Hermione met his eyes, his shock was replaced slowly by a grin.

Hermione looked back down at her book, her heart beating just a little faster. There was a tingle in her fingertips. There was a glow in her chest. Satisfaction. Retribution.

_x_

_x_

_x_

_fin_

* * *

**Thanks for reading!**

**As ever, I love hearing from you; do drop me a line.**

**-Speech**


	2. Dean

_**Dean Thomas + this World Cup**_

* * *

"Dad, you're so embarrassing," Ila mumbles, but Dean barely hears her.

"That's it, that's it," he's roaring, waving a flag in the air. "Run faster, you git!"

Jay tugs on his mother's sleeve, his bottom lip stuck out in a tragic pout. "Mum, what's so exciting about this game? Everyone's on the ground —"

Parvati hushes him. "Just pretend it's Quidditch without the brooms."

"Still boring," Jay whines.

Something happens on the field that makes everybody around them groan. Parvati cranes her neck to see the aftermath, but the man in front of them keeps shifting, obscuring her vision.

She sighs, unsticking her shirt from the nape of her neck. She's sweating and uncomfortable; she hardly even knows the rules of football. This morning, in a fit of foolish vanity, she put on a pair of large gold earrings that are now tugging down heavily on her earlobes, making them ache. By all rights, she should be miserable.

But as she looks at her husband bouncing eagerly on the tips of his toes, one corner of her mouth lifts.

At the start of June, the Thomas family took a series of Portkeys to Argentina. They watched the Quidditch World Cup quarterfinals there, in the Patagonian desert. Parvati enjoyed herself immensely, especially the surprise victory by Bulgaria — but they had to cut their viewing of the tournament short, so they could move to Brazil for this football nonsense.

England's first match was a disappointing loss to Italy, and this mess against Uruguay isn't shaping up much better. There are only a few minutes left, but Dean is yelling bravely, refusing to acknowledge their inevitable defeat.

If they lose here, they'll be ousted from the tournament entirely, which Parvati finds ridiculous. What's going on with this 'group' business, anyway? What even is a FIFA? That sounds like an instrument.

Honestly, the depths to which Parvati doesn't care about football are rivaled only by the depths to which Ila and Jay do not care about football. Ila, their first child, is a speed-flier, frighteningly good for fourteen, and considers any sport that doesn't involve brooms an utter waste of time. Jay, on the other hand, is thirteen and bookish, and couldn't care about any sport at all if he were bribed. Which Dean has tried to do, repeatedly.

Dean has become almost frighteningly invested in sports. He bets hundreds of Galleons a month on Quidditch matches, and he's damn good at it, too. He and Parvati both work for the Ministry, but they wouldn't be nearly as well-off if Dean weren't so gung-ho about his Sports Guesses, as Parvati calls them.

It's strange. She can't remember him being as rabid about Quidditch, or even football, when they married fifteen years ago. But now he is practically frantic about it all.

The match ends in disgrace. Dean is crestfallen, his enthusiasm sliding off his face like raw egg. As the family traipses back to their hotel, he grows quieter while the children grow louder and happier, finally freed from their obligation to pretend like they care about Muggle sports.

They arrive back at the hotel. Privately, Parvati thinks this hotel is the best part of the trip. Dean apparently felt guilty about stealing his family away from Quidditch, guilty enough to book them a place at the Fasano Hotel. It's a five-star place with embarrassingly luxurious suites. Crisp white bedsheets and gauzy curtains complement the warm hardwood floors — and the view of the city? Spectacular.

Parvati sets down her bag on the recliner, tugs out her wand, and straightens up their Muggle suitcases, which — while strange — are at least fashionable. The kids vanish into their room, Ila fishing out her broom polish to groom her Nimbus Slant, Jay pulling out the novel he's reading now. It's about a cleaning witch who pretends to be a Muggle for a year, God knows why. Parvati has stopped questioning their son's reading habits.

Their door shuts with an enthusiastic bang. Parvati tugs her earrings from her ears with a relieved sigh, heads to the bathroom, and coaxes the pain out from her earlobes with warm water.

"What are you thinking for dinner, honey?" she calls out.

"I don't know," says Dean's voice quietly.

Parvati sets down the washcloth and heads back into their bedroom. She places her hands on her hips, eyeing Dean shrewdly. He sits on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped in his lap.

"What's wrong?" she says.

"The match."

"Oh, don't," Parvati says. "What's wrong, come on, you can tell me."

He looks up at her with fondness scrawled across his honest features. "Come here," he says.

Parvati sighs and seats herself beside him. He cranes his neck and kisses her on the temple, brushing a wisp of black hair from her forehead. "Thanks for doing this," he says quietly. "I know you would've rather stayed in Argentina."

"Well, of course I would have. Padma was there — and the Weasleys; it was so nice to catch up with Ginny." Parvati looks at him frankly. "But there's no need to thank me. It's not a compromise. Half and half makes sense."

He grins. "Yeah. Always has, hasn't it?"

Parvati cups Dean's hand with hers. "And it's nice, being here," she admits. "At the Quidditch Cup, too — but this, as well. Seeing you this excited."

"Yeah, it's a rush, isn't it?" he says.

There's something strange about his voice. Parvati can't place it.

Dean shakes his head, twisting the gold band around his fourth finger. Suddenly, he says, "Everything's — everything's just quiet, you know? Still quiet, and sort of far away. And this wakes me up a bit, I think." He looks at her. "Do you know what I mean?"

Parvati can't quite meet his eyes. "Are you saying you _miss_ …"

"No, of course I don't. That would be … no, I don't miss being scared all the time, I don't miss …"

They sit in silence for a good minute.

"But there are some things," Parvati says quietly. He meets her eyes. She remembers blasting a Body-Bind curse at Antonin Dolohov, illuminating Dean's face with the light of the spell, saving him by seconds. She remembers the instant gratitude on his expression, the split-second of recognition — the hasty words spat through the battlefield; she remembers diving for safety with her heart hammering so hard, she could swear it was writing a battle song there in her chest.

She remembers Lavender's funeral, her friend's dead face, unforgettable and young. The swarm of people hounding her with a million words, pretty condolences. She remembers Dean walking up to her, wordless, and she could see the emotion stuck there in his throat, choking him, and she knew he could understand. He clasped her in a brief, hard hug, and the warmth of him bled right into her.

She remembers how everything felt after the battle. How immediate and raw. She remembers how mercilessly time ground forward. Days of celebrations, and it still didn't feel like it could be true; everything was a haze, wasn't it? Everything was an insane high, he was _gone_, they were free. It was hard to sleep, the celebrations through the nights were so loud. Politics in the newspapers were a joke; even hunting for Death Eaters was a joke; everything was a big fucking joke all of a sudden. There were no feet on the ground. Parvati didn't feel real.

She remembers the blistering summer of 1998, walking through Hogsmeade with tired feet. She remembers colliding with Dean there, at the Three Broomsticks, by accident, and how they spoke with strange strained voices, and how suddenly — mid-conversation — their small talk blistered and broke, turned into something more. Something frighteningly honest, something about loss and exhaustion and fear and relief.

She remembers how frantically their relationship advanced. How, when they saw each other every night, they grasped each other like nervous children clutching at the hems of their clothes. She remembers her heart pounding through the first whisper of _I love you, _in August, buried at 1:30 in the morning in a haze of dreams that weren't quite nightmares but were dreadfully close.

He called her brave and beautiful. She called him brave, and hers. They were married a year later. She remembers, even now, the soaring, searing taste of the wedding, of his kiss on her lips.

Now, sitting here on a hotel bed in Sao Paulo, Parvati feels disconnected, like her mind is swimming in the ocean of her body. Is everything faded, here in Brazil, aged thirty-four? Does he feel it too? Is that just their mutual imagination?

"There are some things," Dean echoes. His voice is as soft and empty as the brush of grass. "I know."

"It's funny," Parvati says, remembering the gold of Lavender's hair, the excited slap of her laugh. Everything. "It's funny, really it is. What I mean to say is — you don't miss looking over the edge. You don't miss hitting the ground. But you miss the falling part of it, you know? Do you know what I mean?"

_x_

_x_

_x_

_fin_

* * *

**Thanks for reading! Please do drop me a line if you liked it.**

**xx**

**-Speech**


	3. Blaise

_**Blaise Zabini + his relationship with his mother**_

* * *

She'd always told him not to get attached. Not to the house — there would be another, once they moved. Not to his friends — sometimes people changed, and it was best to have a way out. Certainly not to ideas. Ideas were mutable and disposable.

Blaise was eight years old when his mother knelt, took his hand, and said, "The more quickly you're willing to abandon something, the safer you are." He nodded, though of course he didn't understand yet. Sometimes you only understand things after you have lived them repeatedly.

It was the summer before his seventh year when they moved to the heart of London, into a flat his mother had designed herself. It had cost a fortune, as his mother had commissioned it to be built on top of a luxury Muggle apartment building. (A pointed comment, Blaise had no doubt, on how above Muggles they were in every sense.)

Finagling the construction had been a matter of extreme delicacy, and had threatened the Statute of Secrecy a grand total of twenty-six times. The fines had increased each time. It didn't matter. Money didn't matter.

You couldn't access the apartment from the building itself. They had a private entrance in the complex's courtyard, buried in a yew tree. With three taps of the wand and a simple incantation, the side of the tree folded inward, and with three steps into the darkness, the visitor emerged twenty stories up, in that perpetually sunlit penthouse. The windows had been charmed for perpetual sunlight. Blaise's mother couldn't stand the rain.

The most terrifying thing about Gia Zabini was how airily she got her way. Faced with obstacles, she waited with a patient smile until someone made them melt before her. Faced with any contrary opinion, she laughed and fluttered a manicured hand. When she sighed sweetly and lowered her voice, that was when the opposition knew they were — to put it delicately — fucked.

Blaise's mother was one for breezes and chiffon, for delicate crystal sculptures, for beauty that was fragile rather than durable. Their House Elves had a hard time keeping every inch of the sprawling, beautiful apartment clean.

Blaise knew to the marrow of his bones that his mother was better than everybody else in the world. Nobody was as sharp, as competent, as ruthless. She'd been investigated seven times for the disappearances of her ex-husbands, and seven times, she had emerged with her head held high and her record spotless.

The last ex-husband had been a tall, cool charmer of a man, director of the Cleansweep company. He'd lasted five years. Blaise knew better than to ask what had happened to him. The last time he'd asked about one of the dead men, he had been six years old. His mother had sighed sweetly and lowered her voice, and told him to go to his room.

She didn't let him out for two days. When he finally came out, she asked him if he understood, and he nodded.

In his early Hogwarts years, they'd learned about blood curses in History of Magic. Nobody else had listened to Professor Binns droning on, but Blaise had paid rapt attention to the idea of cursed bloodlines. _Maybe Mum didn't kill those men,_ he privately thought. Maybe she had simply been cursed — cursed not to be able to hold onto anything or anybody. Cursed to lose every man she loved, maybe.

That notion faded, though, as the years passed. Not everything could be explained by dark magic. His mother certainly couldn't be. Her disdain was a type of magic all its own, not so much dark as uncontestable, like the shriveling of leaves in late October.

* * *

Gia accompanied Blaise to King's Cross on September 1st for the start of his seventh year. At the station, she had a brief, friendly conversation with Alecto Carrow. Blaise sloped down the train into a compartment with his fellow Slytherins, whom he tolerated with just enough good grace to ensure that he could network with them later in life if need be.

It wasn't that he disliked them. He admired Pansy's conviction, and found Draco amusing, once in a while. But they weren't like _him. _He was not an adolescent, like the other Hogwarts students. He'd been forced to grow up more quickly.

Others, of course, interpreted this differently. "Do you ever get bored of being such a stuck-up git?" said Seamus Finnigan to him, once, loudly. Blaise just curled his lip in response.

He kept himself detached throughout seventh year. Not just from the foolish resistance efforts some of the Gryffindors were putting up, but from the simpering sweetness of his fellow Slytherins toward the Carrows. Trying to endear himself to them was an unnecessary expenditure of effort, a stupid power play doomed to fail. His time would be better spent elsewhere, on test results and mastering difficult spellwork. Measurable results of his own competence.

In April, for his eighteenth birthday, his mother sent him his usual package — two books, a box of sweets, and a letter. In the letter, she told him she'd contacted Alecto, ensuring that he would be one of the few students allowed to stay at Hogwarts over Easter holidays.

Blaise had spent holidays at Hogwarts before. In fifth year, his mother had arranged for him to meet with someone at Hogsmeade over Christmas break. This woman was the chief importer of Class B Inorganic Tradeable Materials: she dealt in curls of stone from the Whistling Well, twice-dipped Anti-Temporal Sands from the Mariana Trench, curdled shrieks from High-Wind Wailers. He still had her information. She'd told him to owl her anytime, when he was eventually seeking a job.

His mother spared no expense when it came to making connections for him. She never expected him to get any less than top marks, though. "The best way to achieve your goals is to make sure you're capable of them," she would say lightly. "Get complacent, get underhanded, and — well, you might as well throw those wishes away."

So Blaise stayed at school for Easter again, buckled down, and studied. Fewer students returned after break than before; the place was turning into an empty shell.

When given the ultimatum — stay at Hogwarts for the battle, or leave — he felt almost triumphant. Finally, he could prove he'd learned his lessons well, that he didn't let attachments get in the way of his goals. He left without question and without sentimentality.

He Apparated back to London and made for home, ideas bouncing around his head. Maybe he and his mother could Floo down to their summer home in Spain, in case the battle spread, or in case there was an unfavorable outcome. After all, Gia Zabini had given sizable amounts of money toward the Dark Lord's cause. Not _easy _to trace, but not impossible.

Blaise tapped on the yew tree three times and took three steps into the trunk.

He emerged in their apartment and knew instantly that something was wrong.

A fine sheen of dust lay over the glass tables, clung to the chiffon curtains. A light drizzle collapsed outside the windows, unmasked by charms or false sunlight. The magnificent mirror that hung over the dining room table was folded forward, revealing an empty safe: the Gringotts key was gone.

Blaise was the last man his mother would ever dispose of.

He supposed she'd disappeared out of self-preservation. Cut her losses from the Dark Lord's cause. Blaise was grateful, in a way — grateful that she'd done it this way, vanishing, clearly exonerating him from blame. Grateful, certainly, that she hadn't killed him. Grateful that she'd left him to make his life alone.

He walked slowly to the cabinet and poured himself a drink. It was hundred-year-old Firewhisky, cured over dragonflame. Sipping the amber liquid, he walked through the eerily silent house, through the arboretum with the gracefully drooping Listless Zinnias. He stopped in the bedroom with the arched golden ceiling that his mother had left empty.

Looking at her neatly made bed, he didn't feel surprised. He barely even allowed himself disappointment, let alone sadness. The more willing he was to abandon all that, the safer he would be.

_x_

_x_

_x_

_fin_

* * *

**Thanks for reading! ****As always, reviews make my life, would love if you left one.**

**-Speech**


	4. Minerva

_**Minerva McGonagall + The Weird Sisters**_

* * *

The first person who ever asked Minerva McGonagall to dance was Myron Wagtail.

At the time, they were fifth-years. Myron was a good-looking Gryffindor, square-jawed but spotty, whose hair was really rather longer than Minerva thought it should be, although of course she would never deign to tell him her opinion. The most she ever spared for Myron Wagtail was a light 'hmph' in his direction, punctuated by an arch of an eyebrow.

After all, at fifteen, her eyebrows had already developed the peculiar power to make people quail, gulp, and look away. Not Myron, though. He would just grin widely, showing square teeth. "Perfect Prefect," he would call to her in the hall, "love what you've done with your hair. It looks browner than usual."

"You are in my way," she would reply, before striding past him, her chin elevated to the point of looking practically comical.

Pomona insisted, knowingly, that she would end up marrying him. Minerva told her to stop, please, _honestly, _there are plenty of potions available if you'd like to make me ill.

Privately, on just one occasion, Minerva entertained the notion of going on a date with Myron to Hogsmeade, but she crushed the thought almost instantly. What on earth would they talk about? He fooled around constantly in Transfiguration, and he _didn't like Quidditch. _He spent half his time holed up in empty classrooms with his dunderhead mates, making ridiculous songs about … well, about broomstick handles and Flobberworms. (Minerva had no taste for poorly veiled metaphors. Besides, Merlin's beard, what an unappealing metaphor. _Flobberworms?_)

It was early spring of her fifth year when Hogwarts hosted a ball to celebrate the visit of a flock of Flutterbrush Winglets, a migratory species of carnivorous bird that most wizarding ornithologists had presumed extinct. Famous and accomplished wixen of all stripes visited on the evening of the Spring Ball, and the Winglets ornamented the dusk in black, flapping silhouettes.

Myron approached Minerva in the late hours of the evening. "Perfect Prefect!" he crowed, brushing back his stupidly long hair. "A dance?"

"Wagtail," she said loudly, over the swing music that was playing through some sort of green plant overhead. "No."

"May I ask why not?"

"Of course you may ask. That's no guarantee of an answer."

"Why not?" said Wagtail, with that cheeky grin.

Minerva drew herself up, sighing. She turned on her heel.

"Going back to Gryffindor Tower?"

"Yes," she said, and as she left, he followed, his hands in the pockets of his dress robes. He loped along with a bounce.

"You know," he said confidentially, "my mates and I are playing down at Hogsmeade next weekend. We'd love it if there were a Gryffindor contingent in the audience."

Minerva just gave one curt chuckle. "Of course you would, Wagtail." She looked around. "This must be the first time I've seen you without them. They never leave you alone, do they? — the Great Hall, the Library, the eight of you constantly bickering like sisters."

He chuckled. "Really, do stop by. I've been working on my falsetto."

She didn't go to Hogsmeade — of course not — but strangely, after that evening, she felt a strange camaraderie between them. They would pass each other in the hallway, and he would say, "Looks browner than usual, your hair," and she would shoot back, "Your ego looks larger than usual," and that was about the extent of their relationship.

They never had a real conversation. They knew each other at a comfortable, peripheral level, and they continued their careless banter until the end of their Hogwarts career. Wagtail thought it was a shame, privately. He'd thought she was sharp, and funny, and just a bit terrifying, of course. He liked girls when they were terrifying.

The Weird Sisters named themselves six months after graduating from Hogwarts, but it took three years for them to make their splash in the London music scene. After their widely celebrated single, the grungy, guitar-heavy "Slobberworm," they graduated quickly from dingy bars. They knew they'd really made it when Glenda Chittock invited them to record for the Witching Hour live programme.

For the recording, they played a concert in an abandoned barn in the middle of the Scottish countryside, not far from where Hogwarts was (approximately and presumably) located.

At one point, between his falsetto wails, Myron Wagtail looked out in the audience and thought he saw somebody standing at the back, somebody glasses-clad and brown-haired. Somebody in Hogwarts professor's robes. Somebody looking half-amused and half-pleased.

But when he blinked the sweat out of his eyes, all he saw was the tail of a tabby cat disappearing through the slats of the wall.

_x_

_x_

_x_

_fin_

* * *

**Thanks for reading! As always, would love it if you dropped me a line.**

**-Speech**


	5. Tom

_**Tom Riddle + the moment he realized that people find him attractive**_

* * *

Tom Riddle never raised his hand in class. Raising a hand was symbolic, he thought, of some inner need for validation: to raise a hand was to plead a professor's attention.

And _attention …_ well, Riddle wanted a lot of things, but _attention_ could wait. He would command that, eventually. He would certainly never request it, waving his hand around like some fool advertising his presence.

Tom Riddle never spoke unless he was spoken to, either. Some boys in their grade — Arran Macmillan, for instance, a boy taller than Tom and about twice as wide — commanded attention by speaking loudly and at length. Macmillan seemed to consider it his god-given duty to spew his opinion at anybody within a ten-meter radius, whether it was about the style of a girl's haircut or the quality of a boy's robes.

Perhaps that made him feel powerful. Tom Riddle, though, considered such brash, boyish displays of supremacy practically laughable. He preferred to soak up information, drink it from every source; he preferred to listen, and learn, and wait.

He was good at waiting.

It wasn't as if he needed to make a statement. Everybody knew he was the best by the end of their first week of classes. His levitation charm made the fragment of parchment spiral up, up, up, and smack against the ceiling, pinned there mercilessly. He transfigured his strand of hair into a blade of grass on the first try, and when asked to try turning a cotton ball into an egg, and then a large stone into a duck, he did both immediately, without question and without exertion. He was, by all accounts, a prodigy.

Within the first several months, the first-years had divided themselves up, clinging together in fragile formations like clusters of snowflakes. Riddle wondered if these people actually liked each other, or if they were so terrified of being alone that they resorted to using their classmates as shields.

He was not afraid of being alone, and — as is typical — he was, therefore, alone.

Time wore on. First year turned into second year, and second into third. Although at first they had clamored for his attention, eager to orbit such a promising star, his classmates learned to give him distance. His politeness was suffocating. He allowed nobody past it, gave nobody anything more than pleasantries.

The other Slytherins in particular were growing frustrated; they regarded Riddle as something of a black hole, into which one could pour endless conversation and receive nothing in return. It irritated them, because it made them feel inconsequential, and if there is one thing a Slytherin thirsts for, it is the weighty, satisfying feeling of consequence.

One Slytherin in particular, a fifth-year named Reginald Bulstrode, had taken issue with Riddle's attitude. He made a sneering remark in a crowded common room one evening, as Riddle crossed toward the dormitories: "The only _Riddle_ around here," Bulstrode said, "is who raised him with those manners. Where is he from, a pigsty? A pen full of Muggles, maybe? Classless little snot."

Riddle's walk slowed, then stopped. He turned, ever so slowly, to face Bulstrode, his face terrifyingly blank. The common room seemed to grow a degree colder, and conversations faltered. Some wondered if Riddle was going to curse Bulstrode, but no such excitement ensued. A hint of a bland smile pressed the corners of Riddle's mouth upward, and he made no reply, just left without a word for the dormitories.

The next day, Reginald Bulstrode's cat was found strewn across the Hogwarts lawn in twenty-three bloody shreds.

A wolf, they said, but there was uneasy talk.

Third year turned into fourth, and Riddle returned from summer half a head taller, his bony features no longer boyish, now elegant in a strange, skeletal sort of way. His hair gleamed like teak, every strand permanently in place, as if charmed that way.

It happened in fourth year, in Transfiguration class. They had been assigned a chair each, and had been instructed to turn their chairs into dogs. Riddle's dog, a sleek Doberman, came into the world perfectly trained, and sat at a snap of his fingers.

"That's a beautiful dog," said a voice behind him.

Riddle turned and regarded Abraxas Malfoy with the same cultured disinterest he afforded everybody. "Thank you," he said.

"I think mine likes yours." Abraxas' dog, a snow-white husky, padded toward the Doberman, lay down at his feet, and whined. Abraxas looked at Riddle, and Riddle studied the other boy's face for a long moment before giving one slow, deliberate nod.

"I think so," said Riddle, folding his hands behind his back. He turned back to his dog, and didn't say another word, but when he left the class, Abraxas Malfoy was close behind his shoulder, attracted like a magnet.

They sank toward him one by one, after that, as inexorably as the sun sinks toward the horizon. They fell like wheat before the sickle. Wealthy, old names. Black. Lestrange. Mulciber. His, his, his.

By halfway through fourth year, he had drawn a pack about himself. They were so rabidly devoted that it could have been cause for alarm, had Tom Riddle not been the quiet boy, ever charming, ever responsible, ever good.

_x_

_x_

_x_

_fin_

* * *

**Thanks for reading! Reviews are a delight; do leave one if you have a mo.**

**-Speech**


End file.
